Forward Drive

Matt Damon is stranded on Mars in a new movie directed by Ridley Scott.
Matt Damon is stranded on Mars in a new movie directed by Ridley Scott.Illustration by Tomer Hanuka

Poor Matt Damon. Nobody wants to be friends with him. Last year, in “Interstellar,” he played an astronaut named Mann, who was sent through a wormhole and ended up alone, on a frozen planet. This year, in “The Martian,” he plays an astronaut named Mark Watney, who is marooned in a pelting storm and left behind, alone, on the red planet. The difference is that Mann was cunning and resentful, prepared to cause havoc in his desperation to escape, whereas Watney is cunning and resourceful—not a blamer, or a soul in meltdown, but a model of cockiness and grit as he sets about the business of survival.

Watney is part of Ares III, a NASA mission to Mars, captained by the phlegmatic Lewis (Jessica Chastain), who floats around her ship like a zero-gravity mermaid. The rest of the crew comprises Martinez (Michael Peña), Johanssen (Kate Mara), Vogel (Aksel Hennie), and Beck (Sebastian Stan). Having landed on the planet, and settled into base camp, they last eighteen days before the storm blows in and forces them to abort, blasting off at a perilous angle. Watney is abandoned, presumed dead. All this happens fast, at the outset of the movie—so fast, indeed, that it’s the only section that feels rushed. We scarcely have a chance to get our bearings before they are thrown out of whack, and we see very little of Watney before he wakes up in the desert, on a nice bright Martian day, with a length of broken radar antenna sticking out of his gut. No matter. From here on, we have all the time in the world. And he has four years to kill, on his world, before anyone can swing by to pick him up.

But how do you dramatize a waiting game? Given the threat of tedium, and the stony desolation of the backdrop, some viewers will be bracing themselves for Beckett in space, with the added twist that Godot could burn up on reëntry. Do not fret. The director is Ridley Scott, who, as if taking a cue from his hero, rejoices in the challenge of solitude. He cuts between the cameras mounted inside the base, which show Watney toiling away (plus, in a worrying side panel, the pressure, temperature, and oxygen levels). There is also a video diary, to which Watney confides his schemes and ruminations, all of which scorn the existential in favor of the pragmatic. He is the mission botanist, ideally placed to raise crops with which to feed himself. “Mars will come to fear my botany powers,” he declares, before gathering the dried excrement of his colleagues. Plug your nostrils, add soil, sow seeds, hang around, and—hey presto—potatoes. If there is water on Mars, nobody told Watney, so he has to brew his own. In short, when he announced, early in his predicament, “I’m going to have to science the shit out of this,” he wasn’t kidding.

Ridley Scott is seventy-seven years old, yet the startling fact is that “The Martian” appears to be the work of a young man. When Watney, having made contact with Earth, states that he is “really looking forward to not dying,” he speaks for the whole production, which thrums with an appetite for life. It can’t get enough of the right stuff. There are plenty of scenes back at NASA, where the bigwigs—played by good-humored actors like Jeff Daniels, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Kristen Wiig—struggle to keep up with Watney’s progress, and where even a simple press conference is framed and edited to keep the tone sprightly and deft. Much of Scott’s output in the past decade, from “Kingdom of Heaven” (2005) to “Exodus: Gods and Kings” (2014), resounded with a heavy tread, whereas the new film, based on a novel by Andy Weir, is so light on its feet that anybody listening at the door of the theatre might think that there was a comedy playing inside. Again and again, chances for portentousness arise and get batted aside. When the folks on Ares III, still journeying home, learn that their friend is alive, and that lines of communication are open, Martinez sends him an e-mail: “Sorry we left you on Mars, but we just don’t like you.” He knows that Watney will get a kick out of that, and behind the joshing is the unspoken promise that, come what may, the crew will move heaven and earth to get him back.

It is thirty-six years since Scott made “Alien,” and the true companion piece to that great film is not “Prometheus”—the gloomy, beautiful, and oddly superfluous prequel that he directed in 2012—but “The Martian.” Sigourney Weaver and Matt Damon are cut from similar cloth. True, the first is faced by a beast with acid for blood, while the second solemnly reveals that “it has been seven days since I ran out of ketchup,” but both are loners by force of circumstance and copers by instinct. In a recent interview, Scott described “Robinson Crusoe” as “one of my favorite books as a kid” and its hero as “the first astronaut,” and the new film tunes in to that old fixation. So does its leading man. Damon has never seemed more at home than he does here, millions of miles adrift. Would any other actor have shouldered the weight of the role with such diligent grace? He is our most unstarry star, no longer needing to hunt for our good will. Someone like Tom Cruise is too acutely conscious of his image to convince as a regular Joe, and Christian Bale too remote, whereas Damon, like Crusoe, feels stranded on our behalf, tasked with digging up the best of himself. Hence the first, grainy picture of Watney that is patched through to NASA; he may be Lazarus, come from the dead, but he poses in his spacesuit, thumbs way up, as the Fonz. Terrible place, Mars. Happy days.

If you think Mark Watney is in a tight spot, look at Jafar Panahi. He is the Iranian director whose works include “The White Balloon” (1995), “The Circle” (2000), and “Offside” (2006). With every film, three things have occurred: he has strengthened his reputation as a wry and dexterous humanist; he has urged us to listen to those Iranians, especially women and children, whose voices might not otherwise be heard; and his overlords have grown ever more convinced that this guy is a pain in the neck. The crunch came in 2010, when Panahi was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment, on a charge of creating propaganda against the regime, and banned from making movies for twenty years. Since then, he has occupied himself with projects designed to exasperate his foes. One result was a film with the Magrittean title of “This Is Not a Film” (2011), which was reportedly smuggled out on a flash drive concealed in a cake. If only all releases could be handled in so thrilling a fashion. Imagine if the new James Bond movie could arrive inside a chocolate éclair.

Panahi’s latest exercise in outwitting is “Taxi,” in which he plays himself. He spends almost the entire film behind the wheel of a cab, which he drives around Tehran. It’s never quite clear if he has slid under the radar of the authorities, or if they consider life in a car to be a kind of mobile incarceration, which at least will keep him out of mischief. Nice try, fellows. His conversations are filmed by a dashboard camera, which he occasionally swivels around to inspect the road ahead or to record the activity of his passengers, one or two at a time. “What’s that?” he is asked. “An anti-theft device?” “Sort of,” Panahi replies, and he’s right. Simply by catching these lives on the fly, he offers a fresh rebuke to the embezzlement of his free speech.

The people in his taxi are a mixed bunch. Are they actors, or passersby plucked from the streets? We don’t know, and there are no end credits, but the mystery is sweet. We get a loudmouth who, discussing thieves, announces, “If I were head of state, I’d hang a couple of them, just to shake them up,” then adds that he’s a mugger by trade. There’s a victim of an accident, his head wet with blood, who gets ferried to hospital; a couple of elderly ladies bearing an open goldfish bowl, sloshing with water, as if lent to Panahi by the ghost of Mack Sennett; and a man named Omid—stumpy and sweaty, delivering foreign DVDs around town like drugs. (“I brought you ‘The Walking Dead,’ Season Five.”) Then comes Panahi’s niece Hana, a chatterbox of ten or eleven, and Arash, an acquaintance from his neighborhood. Finally, we meet “the flower lady,” as Hana calls her, a human-rights lawyer en route to a client in jail. She lays a red rose next to the windshield, as if by the headstone of a grave.

The urge to film is never far away. The wounded man dictates his last will and testament into Panahi’s iPhone; Arash has CCTV footage on his iPad, showing him being mugged, which he wants to share with Panahi; and, as for Hana, she has to shoot a short movie for school, under risible restrictions. (For good characters, pupils must “use the sacred names of Islamic saints.”) All this could have yielded something clammy and cloistered, just as Panahi’s status as a martyr for his art could have gulled him into loftiness and pride; and yet, by some miracle, “Taxi” stays as modest as his smile, the point being not to recruit us to his cause but to put us on the side of his compatriots. The mocking of oppression may be steely, but the film’s an easy ride. ♦